glenstein

Or that given time to breathe and reflect, people realize their reaction was disproportionate to the perceived offense.

Where's the 92% coming from? As far as I can tell the peak monthly active users was about 500 million [1] and they're currently at 208 million [2]. If they had shed 92% of their userbase I would expect their active users to be around 40 million. And if we're talking the past few years, they have lost users, but six years ago they were sitting at 231 million compared to today's 208 million, which if my calculator is correct, is a 11% loss not 92%.

1. https://venturebeat.com/dev/firefox-on-fire-with-500m-users-...

2. https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

The inconvenient fact for these anti-Mozilla narratives is that most of those losses were in the 2010s before any of the side bets that people point to. The side bets era is approximately the 2020s, and the big market share losses were approximately in the 2010s, and so the side bets couldn't retroactively have caused the market share losses, and the actual market share losses of the 2020s are real but not consistent with the hysterical narratives that come out in the hn comment sections.

And the other inconvenient fact for these polemics is that actual driver of market share change is Google's dominant position as the world's most visited website and as a distributor that gets to pick the default browser on more than one billion Android devices and counting.

When Microsoft Edge grew it's market share, it wasn't because users A|B tested it against Firefox and found it more preferable, it's because it was a preinstalled default that gained ground over device churn. When Opera had practically the perfect browser in 2011-2012, they didn't conquer the world. When Mozilla did their massive quantum overhaul that delivered huge advances in performance and stability, their market share continued to decline. There are natural experiments left right and center testing the claim that market share is a perfect 1 for 1 response to changes in browser design, and so far they've failed to confirm that hypothesis.

Meanwhile the accusation seems to change on a nightly basis. Yesterday someone was outraged that anyone would dispute that average users don't care about any of this, they just want whatever browser is in front of them as long as it's fast and stable enough (so they claimed). Today, you've tagged in to claim users are hyperfocused on the minutia of Mozilla's design decisions on a day to day basis. Tomorrow somebody's going to claim it's really about something else. The only thing these competing explanations have in common besides hysterical exaggeration, is that they rely on unverified Trust Me Bro stories that never address the inconvenient fact that Google's distribution advantage is the primary driver of market share change. It feels like recreational outrage.

I definitely think it's partly that, but I do think visual redesigns also really strike something primal in the brains of an internet user for whatever reason.

This will expose my internet user age but I remember Marcos Moulitsas talking about DailyKos redesigns, and he noted, correctly I think, that regardless of what you do, a visual redesign will be interpreted as an apocalyptic event to approximately 1/3 of the user base. But it tends to be a flame that burns bright but brief.

Or for another version: there was a time in the history of Facebook where redesigns to the desktop version caused user outrage and mass organization into aggressively titled Facebook groups, protesting for a change. Now I personally think that in many significant respects Zuckerberg is a fool, his investment in meta and VR has been a joke and his perspectives on AI are naive. But I actually think the design and iteration of Facebook itself has been a savvy series of careful iterations, and going this long without shooting himself in the foot is not something to be taken for granted.

Anyway, my point is as a going concern whenever you do a redesign you have to price in a certain amount of recreational outrage from a percentage of the user base that burns bright but brief.

Right, I had an option to choose it (I think I chose device default, though I'm not exactly sure what it means on Windows but I assume it's like "system theme" on Android).

The whiplash from seeing that selectable on my screen to seeing someone claim it's not there in the same 60 seconds is really something.

>and instead focus on features and bugs

Who says they don't? They've pushed 23 new releases since 2025 with thousands of updates that include exactly the bug fixes, performance improvements and security fixes you're talking baout. This latest release, v157, includes the built in dark mode you're asking about (I just saw it on the popup on first launch when installing this new version) and the release notes describe improvements to tabs. v156 included huge performance improvements and they're regularly pushing tons of CSS updates across practically all of the releases.

I don't understand why people claim these things aren't happening when they're regularly documented on their release notes page.

I recommend growing your charitable interpretation muscle, it heads off avoidable confusions like these :)

Check again, his concerts did not go on after all.

>One could use this exact argument to explain one's continued use of, shills for, or even contributions to Ladybird, because what does the maintainer being a bit chuddy have to do with combating Chromium/Firefox's hegemony?

Or, to your point, these arguments could count in favor of Firefox in opposition to Chromium.

I think they already answered this but their explanation simply bounced off you. When your market position and control over development is dominant you can steer the web in self-interested ways that hurt users and hurt the independence of the web as an ecosystem. That's a perfectly legitimate answer to your Q and it's basically stuff they already said the first time around.

You can't really replicate that unless you're a trillion dollar company that chooses software defaults on billions of devices and have the world's most visited website.

The concern is embrace, extend, extinguish.

I agree that not everyone is familiar with them if you're not very immersed in American political culture.

Ooof, it's definitely not just you. I definitely root for Mozilla to succeed and think they're critical in the grand scheme of the browser wars, but that video is rough. It's practically Cocomelon.

It would be the elephant in the room for both Brave and Vivaldi (though the author is not wrong that Vivaldi doesn't seem to to have captured the old Opera magic). The article is at least partially juxtaposing Brave against Firefox.

One person's "rude" is another person's request to tether claims to objective reality in some tractable way, even if it's just a report of plausible enough anecdotal experience.

>Because I never met anyone who said they wanted a slower jankier less intuitive product than what they used before.

Well someone's having big feelings, but this is a straw man, speed and privacy don't have to be mutually exclusive and in practice they aren't for the most part. Users who are casual enough that ad tech telemetry and privacy are mysterious words to them are also not people who are going to note the 0.1% difference in performance that you claim they're prioritizing. Belligerently repeating a just so story based on a flawed framing of trade-offs faced by users doesn't make it more true.

>Most people don't care about privacy and FOSS

Again, this is a just so story, and I think it's just something weird about the vernacular of HN that people are comfortable making claims like this or thinking they can be leveraged to make authoritative judgments. But one person's trust me bro is as good as anothers, and I don't even think it's right that people really are trading privacy for performance and any sort of margin that significant enough to really be noticed. And frankly, if they do notice a performance difference, it's probably because they don't have ad block and if they don't have ad block it's probably because they're using Chrome.

Google actually maintains their market share through a combination of strong user experience and an utterly dominant position as a distributor. Chrome is the default browser on over a billion devices and is advertised and deeply integrated into the ecosystem of the world's most used website. I've said it a million times but if it was just about the inherent quality of the product then Opera would have conquered the world back in 2012.

This mechanism is well understood pretty much anytime software monopolies face legal scrutiny. Microsoft wanted people to believe that Internet explorer was just that much better than the competition, and Google probably wanted the world to believe its search was so much better, which is why it had to be the default option for Apple devices in Europe. But if that was an organic manifestation of consumer preference, it wouldn't have to be maintained with billion dollar arrangements, or hostile ecosystem lockout that came under legal scrutiny.

In a previous generation, the deserving target of eyerolls and groans was people who both-sidesed an issue. In part because it was shallow, and part because it was just a weaponized way of talking where you get to be political under superficial the guise of neutrality. Asking an audience to believe it is just not respecting the intelligence of your audience.

I think the version of that for our generation is the person who says "Gosh let's not talk politics" about obviously political things when doing so is clearly just to shield preferred targets from criticism. Of course it's not always that, and you can never prove it in any particular instance, which is why it's such convenient phrasing. But it gets eye-rolls for a reason.

>Most people just want the best, frictionless and most familiar experience

Every time there's a thread about browsers, at least one commenter presents themselves as a self-appointed representative of "the users" and declares what the users really want.

And it's not that these self-appointed representatives are wrong, necessarily, but they tend to say one of two things: either The People want serious privacy and FOSS commitments and no AI, or they want everything smooth and don't care about privacy. And whichever one it is, it's the most obvious thing in the world, according to the person saying it.

Right, I felt the same thing. Switching to Brave because Firefox "isn't ethical enough" is like switching to McDonald's because the farmer's market produce isn't organic enough.

I knew the "elephant in the room" section of the article was coming before I started reading... but then it wasn't even about the right thing! The other different, bigger, angrier, elephant in the room is about Brave being YACB (Yet Another Chromium Browser). A browser built on the Chromium project is riding on top of that elephant trying to tell it where to go.

I think Google created a "moat" in terms of hyperaccelerating browser development with disproportionate firepower that nobody else could keep up with. And one potential non-terrible use of AI might be diminishing that moat and with it Google's ability to steer the whole web into their ecosystem. So if you want to be an optimist maybe that's a silver lining that will grow with time.

Shucks, you're right. Well, mostly. I misunderstood Hawking radiation as a solution when it actually contributed to the motivation for holding that info was not recoverable. However, he did famously "concede" a bet on the question that he believed was resolved against this belief and it's still the case that his belief by the end of his life was not that it was a "prison" the way the article suggests.

I can't tell if you're aware that they're not synonyms.

I didn't intend to assert a clean distinction, you're exactly right about its connection to string theory. What I mean is that String Theory Writ Large enjoyed a lot of popular esteem in the 00s and 2010s in public communication as being our potential new framework for what lies beneath the quantum world, but string theory is huge in and of itself.

It's more a difference of emphasis (holography in particular) than something that's outside the scope of string theory.

I find myself not agreeing with a lot of nitpicks, but this is a good one! The article says "Contrary to what Stephen Hawking argued, black holes are not inescapable prisons." But information escaping black holes is named after him! He definitely, in the full scope of his career, was perfectly agreeable to the idea of information escaping black holes.

I know what you mean and I think you're right, but I take it as the cost of doing business when trying to turn frontier physics into layperson analogies. You're not going to use an analogy to successfully complete a calculation of black hole entropy, you're going to use it to convey the high level intuition that "stuff on inside = stuff on boundary".

Because if we litigate the imperfections of analogies all day long, then you're going to react to videos titled "black holes described at five levels of difficulty" by saying the first four levels were all wrong, which may in a sense be technically true but not in the spirit of the exercise.

As a non expert who's just curious about science but also tries to talk like a normal person, from what I can tell holography really seems like it's now the leading candidate to be the next big conceptual revolution in physics.

There's not necessarily any breakthrough right around the corner and we shouldn't rush to coronation preemptively, but there's a lot of physics "voting with their feet" for holography as the article says, and I think it's officially time to start getting hyped. It could have sanity-restoring answers to questions of quantum weirdness, albeit at the rather expensive cost of giving up even more on our day to day intuitions about space and time in favor of an apparently informational substrate.

String theory had a generation of great science communicators writing its books and singing its praises, but holography doesn't yet have equivalent public champions, and I hope that's something that changes sooner than later.

I think the principle is correct but probably it would need to be much bigger.

I honestly don't think that people's self reports of whether they have an internal monologue are super reliable. They can mean different things by it or be psychologically attached to a particular representation of their thought processes, it can be related to self concept or self esteem or personal perspective in ways that are hard to tease out.

I think something like this proved to be true when it came to folk theories of different learning styles (e.g. visual vs language based) once those started being tested in rigouros ways. People could still be right but I would be interested to see what we get if we test more directly for subvocalization or fmris for language based brain activity.

It's not sophisticated anything, and slow down the advancement of fastest models is perfectly meaningful and it's the right degree of detail for the context.

It's just a passing reference to a previous statement and again the burden would be on you (generic you) to explain why this context requires more detail.

Dreyfus certainly claims he was mischaracterized, but what he "really" said always turns out to be a conveniently moving target.

He thought that the complexity of chess rendered it solvable in principle but "uncomputable" in practice. You're right that he was speaking to the times he was familiar with, and what he meant by "impossible in practice" was something like letting a 1Mhz computer explore all the possible chess moves from now until the heat death of the universe. Relying on that to insist that computers defeating humans in his lifetime was consistent with what he envisioned stretches past charitability and into sophistry.

And I don't think you can extend him that charity without doing the same in the other direction, which would also collapse his basic thesis. Dreyfus was disproportionately preoccupied with retelling the failures of the 1950s over and over again using them to represent the whole of computing while the world moved on, and extending the same charitable repairs in favor of AI research make it something less easily caricatured, and still based on the same logic gates and 0s and 1s he was criticizing.

If that's not enough, Dreyfus explicitly said that what was lacking in chess programs was (1) any practical ability to do the brute forcing needed, (2) any kind of nim-style logical shortcuts around brute forcing or (3) any kind of expert level heuristics because he categorically believed those simply weren't programmable. And he believed that those exhausted the options. [1]

There's no version of this that can be correct because even if you think he's right that chess engines got better by progressing to some different conceptual paradigm, that paradigm is still embodied in same logic gates and 1's and 0's that he thought only pertained to prior paradigms he was criticizing. He was wrong to assume such things as "heuristics" were outside of that scope.

1. https://repository.essex.ac.uk/42372/1/Martin%20and%20Willia...

I think it's perfectly clear. It means improvements shouldn't simply advance as fast as possible and more specifically, it's a reference to a past statement of theirs to that effect. At that level of generality it's as clear as it needs to be.

I would say the burden is on you to explain why an offhand reference to a previous press release in an executive summary is a context where it's reasonable to expect it to settle the question to the degree of detail you're demanding.

You'll get no disagreement from me here. But be ready because some people live to debate this, and Dreyfus is the poster child for a whole philosophical tradition.

I think what it comes down to, is trying to turn the specialness of human intelligence into undefinable magic, essentially playing god of the gaps with the concept of human insight. So by design, it has to be something that can't be amenable to any formal representation like weights.